coondoggie writes: "Artificial intelligence, a field of programming employed by video game developers to make characters smarter and improve their decisions, still has a ways to go before it actually yields intelligent characters. "There are AI games with very little 'I' in them," said Brian Schwab, senior AI and gameplay engineer at Blizzard Entertainment, which has published the hugely successful "Warcraft," "StarCraft" and "Diablo" series of strategy games."

variables are constantly changing and AI routines must be fairly efficient to keep up

there are also a few different aspects of game AI which don't just affect "decisions". AI routines must also simulate sensory input that is non-existent, such as traversing an obstacle map using a path finding algorithm

game AI also needn't be overly complicated, because while it often seems like game AI's fall short of expectations for a half-decent opponent, there are only so many th